coronavirus Archives

Monday

23 Mar 2020

Coronavirus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to expand the state

Since this is the nearest most of us have ever got to living under the Blitz, I’ve been re-reading George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn. Written in London in 1940, it begins with the famous line: ‘As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’ The first part of the book, titled ‘England Your England’ contains more quotable lines per page than anything not written by Shakespeare. It is here that Orwell explains why he loves Britain, warts and all. The rest of the book, in which he makes the case for ‘democratic socialism’ is maybe less well known, but is characteristically clear and

Ross Clark

Why is the coronavirus mortality rate so much lower in Germany?

Is there something about being Germany which protects the body against coronavirus Covid-19? Probably not, I would guess. In which case why do the latest figures from the Robert Koch Institute show that the country has a case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.3 per cent, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) figures from Italy seem to show a CFR of 9 per cent? To say there is a vast gulf between those figures is an understatement. If nine per cent of people who catch Covid-19 are going to die from it we are facing a calamity beyond parallel in the modern world. If only 0.3 per cent of people who catch

Matthew Goodwin

Will coronavirus revive liberalism – or deliver it a fatal blow?

Politicians, said the historian A.J.P. Taylor, do not create the current of events. They can only float along with them and try to steer. But he was talking about the long contours of European history, not the sudden and shocking arrival of a global pandemic. How to float along and steer through something that looks like an overwhelming tsunami is, largely, unknown. The outbreak of coronavirus has already put much of the world in lockdown. It has pushed the global economy into freefall, killed more than 13,000 people and could yet kill hundreds of thousands more, perhaps millions. It will also have big political effects. Leaders, governments, even ideologies will

Gavin Mortimer

My life as a French prisoner of coronavirus ‘war’

Seventeen per cent of Parisians have fled the city since President Macron ordered France to be confined, as part of his ‘war’ strategy to defeat coronavirus. The lockdown, which began on Tuesday, is for two weeks but on Friday the government indicated that it will likely be extended into April as France struggles to contain a pandemic that has now claimed 674 lives. Police are rigorously enforcing the regulations forbidding people to leave home except to buy provisions or briefly stretch their legs. Thousands have been fined for breaking the rules of confinement and there are reports that in future people will be jailed for up to six months if

Steerpike

Carole’s corona conspiracy codswallop

It seems the Observer’s favourite intrepid investigative journalist has been at it again. Yes, Carole Cadwalladr has been tweeting. On Sunday evening, Cadwalladr decided to deviate from telling her half a million Twitter followers that the UK is in the palm of the Russians by explaining that we are now living through an unprecedented era of press control and media manipulation. Cadwalladr was able to uncover something that no other journalist had yet revealed – that the daily coronavirus press briefings are, in fact, a sham: As you, dear reader, may have guessed by now, this statement is entirely and utterly false. it is untrue. It bears no resemblance to the facts. The press

Sunday

22 Mar 2020

Isabel Hardman

Why hasn’t Boris Johnson announced a coronavirus lockdown?

This weekend has been dominated by photos of people having a jolly good time in groups at the park, or strolling along Columbia Road Flower Market as though nothing has changed. Sunday’s Downing Street press conference was therefore dominated by questions about whether the government would clamp down on this behaviour to stop coronavirus spreading still further. But while Boris Johnson urged people to stop ignoring social distancing rules, telling them that ‘even if you think you are personally invulnerable, there are plenty of people you can infect and whose lives will them be put at risk’, he only suggested that there could be ‘further measures if we think that

Ross Clark

Are people really panic buying?

We have, of course, been transformed into a nation of hoarders and panic buyers. We know this because everyone keeps telling us. There are the queues around the block, waiting for Asda to open; the tearful nurse on Twitter who couldn’t get any food after a 48-hour shift; anecdotes galore about people loading loo rolls into their trolleys by the tree trunk-load, fighting over each consignment as it arrives. How much more civilised we all were – it has been claimed – during wartime. I’m sure there are people panic-buying and hoarding vast quantities of tinned foods, but is it all quite so bad as being made out? It is

Isabel Hardman

The ugliness of coronavirus shaming

In the early years of the First World War, a man out of uniform had a reasonable chance of being stopped in the street by a young woman and handed a white feather. This campaign of social shame encouraged those who had not yet enlisted to do so using white feathers as a symbol of cowardice. It may have had noble roots – encouraging everyone who could serve their country to do so – but it quickly became ugly. Men who had come home for a few days’ leave, men discharged after being injured fighting, and men in exempted professions such as doctors and train drivers, were often handed feathers

Charles Moore

Blitz spirit won’t work against coronavirus

Boris Johnson gave a sort of permission for Mr Sunak’s policy when he said that he and the Chancellor were acting ‘like any wartime government’. Economically, that is surely right. Socially, however, the Blitz spirit won’t work this time. In 1940, men were happy to gather in their clubs and pubs, as the bombs fell, to drink, gossip and enjoy one another’s company. Church congregations rose substantially. The war brought people together. The fight against the coronavirus unavoidably drives us apart. This week, Boris effectively closed most drinking and eating places and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York suspended all services. Boarding and state schools have closed. Many families will spend

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Shop just for what you and your family needs

Robert Jenrick – We will do ‘whatever it takes’ to support those at risk Sophy Ridge was first joined this morning by the Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick. With the threat from coronavirus still looming large, Jenrick told Ridge that the Chief Medical Officer was now officially advising around 1.5 million people at particular risk from the virus to remain indoors for potentially as long as three months. He pledged that the government would do its utmost to support them: RJ: We are writing to these people… and we’re asking them, as soon as practical, to stay at home and to do so for a prolonged period, perhaps as long as

Robert Peston

Doctors and nurses deserve to know if the NHS has enough protective clothing

We are relying on courageous NHS staff to help us through this terrible Covid-19 crisis. So many would say we have a duty to listen to their concerns and anxieties. And as you will be aware, and as the chief executive of St George’s University Hospital’s Jac Totterdell has made explicit, lots of doctors and nurses do not feel that they are being given the appropriate protective clothing. A leading consultant has explained the issue to me. It is probably best if I just use the consultant’s own words. ‘All we get are little plastic aprons that don’t cover your arms or neck or back or lower legs. And no

David Patrikarakos

Corona confusion is being ruthlessly weaponised

Few words have as great a hold on the contemporary imagination as ‘disinformation.’ Few words are as ubiquitous in contemporary discourse or as pervasive in political mud-slinging. Donald Trump castigates the ‘fake news’ media for perceived bias against him; Hillary Clinton blames foreign influence operations for her election loss. Disinformation, propaganda, lies: whatever you wish to call it, it’s the bogeyman of our age, a convenient repository for all our sins. There is a reason for this. The author Shoshana Zuboff has correctly observed that information technology brought with it a revolution that reordered capitalism. Human experience – as found in data, which is how we now harness information –

Saturday

21 Mar 2020

Jeremy Clarke

My love affair with Hannah Arendt

The three of us — me, Catriona and her daughter Skye — were having a wash and brush-up before going out for a meal ata restaurant in the village, when we learnt that President Macron’s smooth dishonest face had just addressed the nation on TV and told it that he had ordered bars, cafés and restaurants and all places of entertainment to be closed until further notice. The news both exhilarated and disappointed: real life had begun in earnest but the bars were shut. Skye assembled a round of gin and tonics and we three settled down in a row with our feet on the coffee table to make our

Taki

The joys of social isolation

No use datelining any more, I’m here for the duration. Even the ski lifts have been ordered to close: chiuso, geschlossen, fermé. The only way to ski now is the old-fashioned way, à la Hemingway: climb up with skins, peel them off, and enjoy the one and only run of the day. Not only is the climbing beneficial to one’s health, it’s also the only thing that’s free in good old Helvetia. Mind you, if too many people do it the Swiss will start charging for it. But for the moment, no one’s doing it as the snow has gone the way of women and children first in a sinking

Toby Young

Quarantine with our new puppy will send me barking

When the news leaked at the weekend that the government was considering telling those aged 70 and over to self-quarantine for 12 weeks to protect them from catching coronavirus, I began to worry about my elderly neighbours. How will they get essential supplies, particularly if the supermarkets’ home delivery services get backed up? What if they’re not on Netflix and have gone through all their box sets? Who will walk their dogs? It was time to summon up that famous Dunkirk spirit and create a network of volunteers willing to muck in until the crisis is over. A bit of googling revealed I was far from alone in thinking this.

Rod Liddle

What a relief to no longer have to pretend to be sociable

Hulking fat chavs pushing shopping trolleys full of lavatory paper back to their Nissan Micras. I can’t think of a better image to sum up the coronavirus crisis right now. I saw a bunch of them outside my local branch of Morrisons on Sunday morning, their expressions uniformly defiant and smug. One family had at least ten multipacks in their trolley — and nothing else. Surely one cannot live on toilet tissue alone, no matter how agreeably scented it might be? I assumed they were part of the panic-buying crowd, although having seen the size of their arses it may well be that this was simply their requisite amount for

James Forsyth

Coronavirus will be a test of trust

We are in a make-or-break moment for trust, not just in this government but in the British state itself. The measures that were announced by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak this week are extraordinary in economic, social and legal terms. When the Covid-19 crisis is finally over, the state will be judged against how effective they were. None of us will have lived through anything like what we are about to experience. If this country gets it broadly right, then trust in our politicians and the state will rise. But if it gets it wrong, then the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state will be changed

Rory Sutherland

Will quarantine for travellers become normal again?

It wasn’t a coincidence that the US government chose Ellis Island as an immigration station. The crucial word is ‘island’. Had the RMS Titanic missed that fateful iceberg in 1912, she would eventually have taken up station at a quarantine area at the entrance to the Lower Bay of New York Harbor, to await medical inspectors who would board the ship from a cutter. The quarantine exam would have been performed aboard, but only for first- or second-class passengers (US citizens were exempt). These would have been inspected for cholera, plague, smallpox, typhoid fever, yellow fever, scarlet fever, measles and diphtheria. A few might have been marked to be sent

Lloyd Evans

Two gentlemen of corona: the scientists helping to fight Covid-19

We will have to get used to this. Every afternoon the prime minister strides into a butterscotch room in Downing Street and stands at a lectern between two drooping flags to give the latest dolorous news to an uncertain nation. How ironic that Boris, who instinctively loathes ‘doomsters and gloomsters’, is obliged to play the mortician’s bean–counter and recite the daily tallies of the infected and the dead. He’s flanked by the best brains in the land. On the right, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s top scientific adviser. To the left, Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer. They wear the usual suit-and-tie uniform of reassuring officialdom. And both men

Matthew Parris

The secret excitement that lurks beneath our distress

Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we lived in Nicosia, Cyprus, when the island was a British colony and Greek Cypriot terrorists were trying to kill us. Our house was near a big army camp and our Cypriot neighbours were friendly, so home felt protected. It never occurred to me, just starting school, that proximity to the military was not a guarantee of security; and it never occurred to Mum and Dad that our neighbours had a small bomb factory, later discovered underneath their chicken house; so indoors seemed safe. But outdoors was different. Our parents, apparently